Musing gets me nowhere, except tired

I went “home” this past weekend to spend Thanksgiving with my parents. I don’t get back to Wisconsin very often these days – it had been almost a year since I was last there – but when I do make the trip there are a couple items always on my agenda. One includes a stop by the cemetery to see a friend.

Every time I look down at her grave, I’m literally floored by how long it’s been since she passed away. It’s now been 3 ½ years, but no matter how much time goes by it feels like it was just yesterday when I’m standing there. There’s a picture of her on the headstone, and it always makes me sad to see how young she died. Every year I look older, but the picture remains the same.

Thinking about it today I started to wonder something. There are 6.7 billion people alive right now, more than 55 million die every year, more than 155,000 die every day (CIA Factbook), there are billions that have come before us, and surely billions to come after us. Given all of that information, and knowing everything we know about will be gone some day, our lives seem kind of inconsequential – but are they? Knowing all of that, why does the death of just one person make me feel so sad?

This led me into thinking about what our purpose is, given how minuscule any one person is in the grand scheme of things. I don’t know, and won’t even try to guess in this post, it’s just something I give thought to from time to time. I tend define my life by my relationships with friends and family, and that gives me purpose, so I guess that’s why I feel sadness standing over my friend’s grave.

I think I posed more questions here than anything, but this whole post is pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things so I guess it’s ok! haha

Here’s a poem I was inspired to write about this time three years ago while thinking about friends and family who had passed away:

As the snow falls towards its destination
Littering the ground in a chaos of
Pristine white serenity
And trees flicker and glow
Bringing illumination to the contiguous dark
Enclosed by windows patterned in frost
As the presents and stockings
Induce vivid memories of years past
And invoke anticipation of what’s to come
A certain, unmistakable content fills us
With all of the feelings of a season filled with family and friends
Laughter and joy
Warmth and caring
And reminiscences of those
Who are with us always
In our memories of them that will never fade